Novo-founded Orbis cracks the chemistry code for macrocycles, raises €26M
29 Feb 2024
An oral alternative to injected or infused biologics is something of a holy grail in drug development, and increasingly, companies are turning to macrocyclic compounds as a possible solution to this long-standing problem. Now, Orbis Medicines has joined the quest, emerging from stealth Thursday with €26 million ($28.1 million) in seed financing and a faster way to develop hundreds of thousands of macrocycle compounds, all orally bioavailable and membrane permeable.
Orbis was founded in 2021 by the Seeds Investment team of Novo Holdings, which co-led the seed round along with Forbion.
The company is developing next-generation macrocycles, dubbed “nCycles,” with its chemistry-led nGen platform, which streamlines and scales up the historically slow and unreliable process, João Ribas told FirstWord. A principal on the Seeds team, he also serves as Orbis’ interim chief business officer.
Creating de novo macrocycles with desirable drug-like properties has been challenging “because their structures are so complex and the number of possible permutations of their structures stretches into near-infinity,” he added.
But thanks to the nGen platform, “we’ve cracked the problem of macrocycle diversity,” Ribas said. “The speed and precision with which our platform operates is a foil to the laborious production techniques historically used across the field.”
The technology, which Orbis believes is the first systematic, high-throughput macrocycle chemistry platform, enables the company to synthesise and assay up to 100,000 compounds in just weeks, de-risking and accelerating development. Next, the team applies machine learning to crunch the large data sets and home in on the most promising lead compounds.
Orbis is first developing oral macrocycles against targets validated by blockbuster antibody therapeutics. While the company hasn’t named specific candidates yet, Ribas said the cardiometabolic, inflammation, and cancer spaces could benefit from oral alternatives to biologics.
“We see the biggest opportunity for patients in the areas requiring chronic treatment, where oral convenience and control over dosing will be a huge value-add to patients and healthcare systems,” he added.
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